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We Are Idiots

Here's a look at new COVID-19 cases over the past few months:

Case counts stopped declining and began to plateau on March 14. Ten days later, on March 24, confirmed deaths began to plateau.

Cases began to rise on March 22. On April 2 or thereabouts, confirmed deaths will probably start to rise too.

We know this relationship. It's obvious and well established. If cases start to rise, then deaths will start to rise a couple of weeks later. By then, however, it's too late to do anything. We just have to ride it out.

And yet, time after time, we ignore it. We see that the case count is declining and start opening things up well before the count is even in the general neighborhood of zero. When the case count begins to plateau, we look the other way and hope that it's just a blip. When it becomes clear that it's not a blip, we shrug because, hey, there's nothing we can do about it now.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. It's no wonder the head of the CDC feels a sense of impending doom.

POSTSCRIPT: Will vaccines save us this time around? To some degree, probably yes. But why couldn't everyone have waited just another few weeks? Why didn't the CDC try to convince everyone to wait a month, instead of simply issuing vague guidelines? I don't know. It's above my pay grade.

38 thoughts on “We Are Idiots

  1. akapneogy

    "It's above my pay grade."

    No it isn't. You just said it - We're idiots. And we're smug exceptionalist rugged individualists bent on self destruction.

    1. Special Newb

      Except as Kevin shows in various charts, this is not a unique American thing. Plenty of other non-Asian countries have gone through this.

  2. golack

    NJ has been seeing a rise in cases and hospitalizations for a while--but deaths have been steady or even still declining slightly.
    MI has seen a more recent spike in cases (still going up) and hospitalizations--and now deaths.
    (NY numbers have been bouncing around a bit, so hard to pick out trends amongst artifacts)
    Using CovidActNow data. CDC apparently is posting data on deaths, not using date reported, but date of diagnosis (?). In other words, long lag time, but perhaps easier to line up cases with hospitalizations and deaths--eventually?

  3. Brett

    At least the death rate probably won't be as bad this time around, due to so many older folk getting vaccinated.

    It's still irritating and pointless, though. I remember thinking that Covid restrictions would start to collapse in the US as soon as most of the elderly had been vaccinated and the vaccines started being more widely available.

    1. oakchairbc

      The Covid restrictions and social distancing accomplished one major goal in that they reduced hospital overcapacity. If everyone gets Covid at the same time deaths will be a lot higher compared to if everyone gets it over a large period of time. In Italy and some other places they had to let patients die because they did not have the medical equipment to provide acute care.

      Overall death rates (meaning all deaths not just those labeled as Covid) is the most proper and accurate measurement to look at. If someone dies from heart disease or cancer because the hospital is overcrowded they aren’t recorded as a Covid death but they died because of the social effects of Covid. If a country let’s homeless people starve and instead of dying from Covid this would make the country appear to have had better Covid response. Trumps comment that if we don’t test it it does not exist contained an important truth. What and how something is labeled/tested/recorded can dramatically change what is perceived.

  4. Jasper_in_Boston

    I could more or less understand inability to persevere in mask-wearing and social distancing protocols if there were no hope of a medical solution. A year is a long and tedious time, after all, and if vaccines hadn't panned out, it would be hard to condemn a feeling of resignation to America's inevitable fate (natural herd immunity). But that's not reality. In fact the country should be at the cusp of induced herd immunity in June based on the current rate of vaccinations.

    Throwing in the towel now on common sense practices is sheer madness. What's another eight weeks?

  5. painedumonde

    Welcome, welcome, welcome, I've inhabited this perch for about eleven months. I just hope it's not eleventy months.

  6. rameshumfj

    I refuse to admit!! I have begun to hate the royal first person “we”. Yes idiots abound, I agree. That’s as far as I’ll go.

    Impending, my foot. No disrespect intended to the pained Doctor.

    —r

  7. sleepingbeardune

    I can't explain the why but can explain the how in my State of MD...Governor Hogan just up and decided to open the State up entirely a few weeks back for no good reason that I can discern, and now infections are shooting up. Actually, I can explain the why, and it is this: America had a choice between one last orgy of death and illness, or just staying relatively locked down for another few weeks, so of course we chose the former because that's what we've been doing for the entire pandemic.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      Also, Biden is president now, so any dieoff in Maryland, Gov. Crabcakes can blame on the Democrat Party.

  8. Special Newb

    I was a little aghast at how .... emotional .... the cdc director got, but it's probably that I'm just inured to the death. I myself have almost no pandemic fatigue but as a country we just accept a high level of death. Always have.

  9. DFPaul

    Biden made a mistake with his "Neanderthal" comment, though the sentiment was right. Better to say "don't surrender. Americans don't surrender" or some such. Remember when Trump said people who didn't wear masks and went back to work and shopping were "warriors"?

    1. bbleh

      Hmm, I wonder. I think there's no question he got a little mileage with Dems for the comment, and I'm not sure he would have got any at all with Republicans by going militant.

  10. D_Ohrk_E1

    I think you should spend some time looking at the regional data, first. The upper midwest and New England areas are seeing the highest increases, but the south and west is generally still falling or stuck near their respective plateaus.

    Perhaps, this is a sign that some virulent strains are starting to spread outward from specific regions, and as such, vaccines need to be diverted immediately to tackle these regions that are seeing the highest cluster of outbreaks.

    1. Midgard

      Not impressed. Hospitalization has barely budged and we knew it wouldn't be until May 1st herd immunity was even a distance look out of being reached. Things are relatively stable.

  11. Salamander

    Oh, you think the infection rate is rising NOW? Just wait a week or two after Easter.

    I finally got my vaccination invite this morning! But it was for some location in Clovis, a four hour drive EACH WAY, tomorrow. So I go back to the end of the line, it looks like.

  12. glipsnort

    We are indeed idiots, but even if we weren't there might well have been an increase in cases (and deaths) thanks to the rapidly spreading viral variants.

    1. Mitch Guthman

      I don't think that follows. The public health measures that we should have been using (masks, hand washing, etc) seem to be equally as effective against the different variants as against the "original" Covid-19 virus. The reason why the variants are spreading is that large groups of people who are not taking precautions are being exposed to these admittedly more contagious varieties but that is also a function of not taking precautions seriously and opening up too soon.

        1. Mitch Guthman

          I don’t think it’s realistic to say that about Florida’s situation given what we know about the governor’s extraordinary efforts to manipulate and suppress information even to the extent of arresting and prosecuting critics of his actions. It’s possible that the official figures are accurate but how would you know and why would you trust them?

          You could be in the middle of a huge surge and have no way of knowing.

          1. Atticus

            Maybe, but I doubt it just based on observation. For a while I was constantly learning of acquaintances testing positive. I haven't heard of that in a while. Also, my kids' schools and the one my wife teaches at (three in total) had to send emails every time a student or staff member tested positive. For a while each school was sending several a week, sometimes several a day. But there's only been a trickle, if any, for a few months. (Note, these were people that tested positive that just happened to be students or teachers. None of them contracted it at school.)

        2. iamr4man

          Florida is currently experiencing a rise in new cases and deaths. It started last week, so maybe you haven’t noticed it yet.

      1. glipsnort

        It certainly makes it possible. If the public health measures are equally effective against the variants and the variants are much more transmissible, then the reproductive rate will increase even if the measures don't change at all. If the change pushes R over 1, then cases will increase.

  13. dmcantor

    I am more optimistic than you are about the impact of vaccines. The initial roll-out has been pretty well targeted at those who are at greatest risk of severe disease, hospitalization and death. I've seen estimates that upwards of 75% of elderly people (including me!) have been vaccinated at this point. So, hopefully, the uptick in cases won't translate in the same way to increased deaths.

    That said, our household hasn't changed any of its behaviors, regardless of changes to state and local guidelines

  14. Pittsburgh Mike

    Well, we may luck out on the deaths, since so many of the most vulnerable are now vaccinated. My concern is that by continuing to spread Covid, we're risking the spread of variants against which the vaccines are less effective. Still, that doesn't seem to be a big issue yet -- apparently the vaccines are pretty effective against most of the variants (maybe with the exception of the South African variant).

    But yes, this is stupid. We shouldn't be reopening yet, when we probably can do so safely in what, another two months. We're 13 months in, and we can't wait any more?

    1. dausuul

      My fear is that the combination of surging infections among the non-vaccinated, with widespread but not universal vaccination, will *create* a vaccine-resistant strain.

  15. Yikes

    Hard to say if we are idiots or not. I have this nagging suspicion that years down the line we will figure out its all math -- it just depends on how many people from different households mix when unprotected.

    That would mean that supermarkets, for example which have been open right through here in California, have no effect because (1) precautions are universal and (2) in any event people are not within a couple of feet of non-household members for long.

    On the other had, all it would take is a population wide shift to gathering with strangers to change the numbers.

    The above is the only reason I can think of why California had the same surge as every other state, notwithstanding the difference in weather.

    We are all going to get vaccinated before we figure out how to behave, basically.

  16. jonnymac27

    I agree we're idiots, but the fact that people have lost patience is understandable. We've had vaccines available for 4.5 months now, and in my state of WA just finally entered "Phase 1- B: Tier 4", and still have 75% of the population to go. It's agonizingly slow going (No, nobody should be impressed, I don't care how much better than the EU we're doing, or whatever).

    I get that we're suffering the result of poor decisions and lack of urgency by the Trump admin like 10 months ago, but that doesn't change people's experience of isolation today. Biden admin is doing better, but frankly, I'm not blown away by sense of urgency.

  17. Yikes

    Also, we never really got a handle on what to do as a matter of direct cause and effect.

    For anyone who takes the time to understand, masks make a huge difference when worn in a large population because the effectively act to increase "functional" distance that an exhaled breath can reach.

    But we never got any kind of tracing system in place. Because of that, we are really sort of still using common sense, rather than science, when it comes to enforcing limitations. Had everyone with a cell phone engaged in mandatory tracing, we would know more than the gross number of infections, we could know exactly how someone got infected.

    Whether it was at home or at a barbershop or whatever. Then we could say exactly what to close and open.

  18. kenalovell

    Biden had the right message. "Just hang in there a bit longer, and you can celebrate the beginning of the end on July 4." But Republicans weren't going to give that a chance to play out and give Democrats all the credit, so they claimed it was OK to open up now. And then the nervous nellies on the left chimed in by calling Biden irresponsible, 'cos maybe all these new variants would mean we'd still be wearing masks next year.

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